Friday Finds: Wim Crouwel

From right to left:

Roger Hilton, Gwyther Irwin, Bernard Meadows, Joe Tilson, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1965

Op Losse Schroeven: situaties en cryptostructuren, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1969

Frank Stella, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1970

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Let’s start Monday morning off with a Friday Find (found Friday, Jan. 4): 3 catalogues from the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) designed by Wim Crouwel and Total Design.

Take a minute to appreciate Crouwel’s graphic restraint, his enslavement to the grid and his dedication to Univers.

Take another minute to read these excerpts describing how prevalent Crouwel’s design was in the Netherlands:

“It was actually quite difficult to avoid Wim Crouwel’s work. In the 1960s the Netherlands was inundated with posters, catalogues, stamps designed by him—even the telephone book.”

—Karel Martens

“Wim Crouwel’s work has been a part of our lives since the day we were born. We grew up in a graphic landscape created by Crouwel and his contemporaries. The books we used at school, the telephone book, stamps: a lot of the printed matter in the Netherlands was designed by studios such as Total Design. (As a matter of fact, the city where both Erwin and Danny were born, Rotterdam, had a logo designed by Crouwel). As a consequence, we feel as if the graphic language of Crouwel is our mother tongue, our natural language. It’s a part of our roots.”

—Experimental Jetset

NOTE: Both of the above excerpts are from IDEA magazine #323, a recently published feature issue about Crouwel and his work.